Crews are working to repair damage to the Central Valley’s levee system.
The situation at Oroville Dam garnered national attention and brought into clear focus the limitations of our aging flood protection infrastructure – California’s complex system of dams, levees, and bypasses – as well as the need for greater investment in maintaining and upgrading this system.
It is appropriate, then, that Governor Brown recently unveiled a plan to bolster dam safety and flood protection. By requiring emergency action plans, beefing up our dam inspection program and increasing our investment in emergency response, Governor Brown is taking an important first-step in tackling this difficult problem.
This comes at an especially important time as infrastructure maintenance is at the forefront of state and national discussions, and we still have a few months to go before we are out of the rainy season.
Data science in farm management is one of the biggest trends to hit both agriculture and Silicon Valley in recent years, with an explosion of technologies emerging to help farmers optimize everything from seeding to irrigation to fertilizer application.
As populations in Colorado and the West continue to grow, water is moving from farms to cities. The current practice of “buy and dry” in Colorado – buying farmland only for its water – is bad for farmers, bad for rural communities and bad for critical ecosystems across the state.
In early December, I flew out to Amsterdam to attend the Global Impact Investor Network (GIIN) Forum with 600 other delegates ranging from managers of pension funds and banks to individual investors from at least 30 countries.
The corn and soybean fields that stretch for miles across the Midwest are quiet this time of year, mostly frozen surfaces waiting for the spring planting season.